http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13367-the-corporate-war-against-teachers-as-public-intellectuals-in-dark-times
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A little learning is a dangerous thing.
- Alexander Pope
The tragic deaths of 26 people shot and killed at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., included 20 young children and six
educators. Many more children might have been killed or injured had it
not been for the brave and decisive actions of the teachers in the
school. The mainstream media was quick to call them heroes, and there
is little doubt that what they did under horrific circumstances reveals
not only how important educators are in shielding children from imminent
threat, but also how demanding their roles have become in preparing
them to negotiate a world that is becoming more precarious, more
dangerous - and infinitely more divisive. Teachers are one of the most
important resources a nation has for providing the skills, values and
knowledge that prepare young people for productive citizenship - but
more than this, to give sanctuary to their dreams and aspirations for a
future of hope, dignity and justice. It is indeed ironic, in the
unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a
shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge
- albeit briefly and inadequately - the vital role they play every day
in both protecting and educating our children. What is repressed in
these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under
vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious
fundamentalists, and centrist democrats since the beginning of the
1980s. Depicted as the new "welfare queens," their labor and their care
has been instrumentalized and
infantilized;
[1]
they have been fired en masse under calls for austerity; they have seen
rollbacks in their pensions, and have been derided because they teach
in so-called "government schools." Public school teachers too readily
and far too pervasively have been relegated to zones of humiliation and
denigration. The importance of what teachers actually do, the crucial
and highly differentiated nature of the work they perform and their
value as guardians, role models and trustees only appears in the midst
of such a tragic event. If the United States is to prevent its slide
into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other
things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship
between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching,
the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals and
the relationship between teaching and social responsibility. This essay
makes one small contribution to that effort.
The War Against Public School Teachers
Right-wing fundamentalists and corporate ideologues are not just
waging a war against the rights of unions, workers, students, women, the
disabled, low-income groups and poor minorities, but also against those
public spheres that provide a vocabulary for connecting values,
desires, identities, social relations and institutions to the discourse
of social responsibility, ethics, and democracy, if not thinking itself.
Neoliberalism, or unbridled free-market fundamentalism, employs modes
of governance, discipline and regulation that are totalizing in their
insistence that all aspects of social life be determined, shaped and
weighted through market-driven measures.
[2]
Neoliberalism is not merely an economic doctrine that prioritizes
buying and selling, makes the supermarket and mall the temples of public
life and defines the obligations of citizenship in strictly consumerist
terms. It is also a mode of pedagogy and set of social arrangements
that uses education to win consent, produce consumer-based notions of
agency and militarize reason in the service of war, profits, power and
violence while simultaneously instrumentalizing all forms of knowledge.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
The increasing militarization of reason and growing expansion of
forms of militarized discipline are most visible in policies currently
promoted by wealthy conservative foundations such as the Heritage
Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute along with the
high-profile presence and advocacy of corporate reform spokespersons
such as Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and
billionaire financers such as Michael Milken.
[3]
As Ken Saltman, Diane Ravitch, Alex Means and others have pointed out,
wealthy billionaires such as Bill Gates are financing educational
reforms that promote privatization, de-professionalization, online
classes, and high-stakes testing, while at the same time impugning the
character and autonomy of teachers and the unions that support them.
[4]
Consequently, public school teachers have become the new class of
government-dependent moochers and the disparaged culture of Wall Street
has emerged as the only model or resource from which to develop theories
of educational leadership and reform.
[5]
The same people who gave us the economic recession of 2008, lost
billions in corrupt trading practices, and sold fraudulent mortgages to
millions of homeowners have ironically become sources of wisdom and
insight regarding how young people should be educated.
Attesting to the fact that political culture has become an adjunct of
the culture of finance, politicians at the state and federal levels,
irrespective of their political affiliation, advocate reforms that
amount to selling off or giving away public schools to the apostles of
casino capitalism.
[6]
More importantly, the hysterical fury now being waged by the new
educational reformists against public education exhibits no interest in
modes of education that invest in an "educated public for the culture of
the present and future."
[7]
On the contrary, their relevance and power can be measured by the speed
with which any notion of civic responsibilities is evaded.
What these individuals and institutions all share is an utter
disregard for public values, critical thinking and any notion of
education as a moral and
political practice.
[8]
The wealthy hedge fund managers, think tank operatives and increasingly
corrupt corporate CEOs are panicked by the possibility that teachers
and public schools might provide the conditions for the cultivation of
an informed and critical citizenry capable of actively and critically
participating in the governance of a democratic society. In the name of
educational reform, reason is gutted of its critical potential and
reduced to a deadening pedagogy of memorization, teaching to the test
and classroom practices that celebrate mindless repetition and
conformity. Rather than embraced as central to what it means to be an
engaged and thoughtful citizen, the capacity for critical thinking,
imagining and reflection are derided as crucial pedagogical values
necessary for "both the health of democracy and to the creation of a
decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."
[9]
This is clear by virtue of the fact that testing and punishing have
become the two most influential forces that now shape American public
education. As Stanley Aronowitz points out,
Numerous studies have shown the tendency of public schooling to dumb
down the curriculum and impose punitive testing algorithms on teachers
and students alike. Whether intended or not, we live in an era when the
traditional concepts of liberal education and popular critical thinking
are under assault. Neo-liberals of the center, no less than those of the
right, are equally committed to the reduction of education to a
mean-spirited regime of keeping its subjects’ noses to the grindstone.
As the post-war "prosperity," which offered limited opportunities to
some from the lower orders to gain a measure of mobility fades into
memory, the chief function of schools is repression.[10]
Instead of talking about the relationship between schools and
democracy, the new educational reformers call for the disinvestment in
public schools, the militarization of school culture, the
commodification of knowledge and the privatizing of both the learning
process and the spaces in which it takes place. The crusade for
privatizing is now advanced with a vengeance by the corporate elite, a
crusade designed to place the control of public schools and other public
spheres in the alleged reliable hands of the apostles of
casino capitalism.
[11]
Budgets are now balanced on the backs of teachers and students while
the wealthy get tax reductions and the promise of gentrification and
private schools.
[12]
In the name of austerity, schools are defunded so as to fail and
provide an excuse to be turned over to the privatizing advocates of
free-market fundamentalism. In this discourse, free-market reform
refuses to imagine public education as the provision of the public good
and social right and reduces education to meet the immediate needs of
the economy.
For those schools and students that are considered excess, the
assault on reason is matched by the enactment of a militaristic culture
of security, policing and containment, particularly in urban schools.
[13]
Low-income and poor minority students now attend schools that have more
security guards than teachers and are educated to believe that there is
no distinction between prison culture and the culture of schooling.
[14]
The underlying theme that connects the current attack on reason and the
militarizing of social relations is that education is both a Petri dish
for producing individuals who are wedded to the logic of the market and
consumerism and a sorting machine for ushering largely poor black and
brown youth into the criminal justice system. There is no language
among these various political positions for defending public schools as a
vital social institution and public good. Public education, in this
view, no longer benefits the entire society but only individuals and,
rather than being defined as a public good, is redefined as a private
right.
Within this atomistic, highly individualizing script, shared
struggles and bonds of solidarity are viewed as either dangerous or
pathological. Power relations disappear and there is no room for
understanding how corporate power and civic values rub up against each
other in ways that are detrimental to the promise of a robust democracy
and an emancipatory mode of schooling. In fact, in this discourse,
corporate power is used to undermine any vestige of the civic good and
cover up the detrimental influence of its anti-democratic pressures. It
gets worse. A pedagogy of management and conformity does more than
simply repress the analytical skills and knowledge necessary for
students to learn the practice of freedom and assume the role of
critical agents, it also reinforces deeply authoritarian lessons while
reproducing deep inequities in the educational opportunities that
different students acquire. As Sara Robinson points out,
In the conservative model, critical thinking is horrifically
dangerous, because it teaches kids to reject the assessment of external
authorities in favor of their own judgment - a habit of mind that
invites opposition and rebellion. This is why, for much of Western
history, critical thinking skills have only been taught to the elite
students - the ones headed for the professions, who will be entrusted
with managing society on behalf of the aristocracy. (The aristocrats, of
course, are sending their kids to private schools, where they will
receive a classical education that teaches them everything they'll need
to know to remain in charge.) Our public schools, unfortunately, have
replicated a class stratification on this front that's been in place
since the Renaissance.[15]
As powerful as this utterly reactionary and right-wing educational
reform movement might be, educators are far from willingly accepting the
role of deskilled technicians groomed to service the needs of finance
capital and produce students who are happy consumers and unquestioning
future workers. Public school teachers have mobilized in Wisconsin and a
number of other states where public schools, educators and other public
servants are under attack. They have been collectively energized in
pushing back the corporate and religious fundamentalist visions of
public education, and they are slowly mobilizing into a larger social
movement to defend both their role as engaged intellectuals and
schooling as a public good. In refusing to be fit for domestication,
many teachers are committed to fulfilling the civic purpose of public
education through a new understanding of the relationship between
democracy and schooling, learning and social change. In the interest of
expanding this struggle, educators need a new vocabulary for not only
defining schools as democratic public spheres, students as informed and
critically engaged citizens, but also teachers as public intellectuals.
In what follows, I want to focus on this issue as one important
register of individual and collective struggle for teachers. At stake
here is the presupposition that a critical consciousness is not only
necessary for producing good teachers, but also enables individual
teachers to see their classroom struggles as part of a much broader
social, political and economic landscape.
Unlike many past educational reform movements, the present call for
educational change presents both a threat and a challenge to public
school teachers that appear unprecedented. The threat comes in the form
of a series of educational reforms that display little confidence in the
ability of public school teachers to provide intellectual and moral
leadership for our youth. For instance, many recommendations that have
emerged in the current debate across the world either ignore the role
teachers play in preparing learners to be active and critical citizens
or they suggest reforms that ignore the intelligence, judgment and
experience that teachers might offer in such a debate. At the same
time, the current conservative reform movement aggressively disinvests
in public schooling so as to eliminate the literal spaces and resources
necessary for schools to work successfully.
Where teachers do enter the debate, they are objects of educational
reforms that reduce them to the status of high-level technicians
carrying out dictates and objectives decided by experts far removed from
the everyday realities of classroom life. Or they are reduced to the
status of commercial salespersons selling knowledge, skills and values
that have less to do with education than with training students for
low-wage jobs in a global marketplace. Or, even worse, they are reduced
to security officers employed largely to discipline, contain, and all
too often, turn
students who commit infractions over to the police and the
criminal justice system.
[16]
Not only do students not count in this mode of schooling, teachers are
also stripped of their dignity and capacities when it comes to
critically examining the nature and process of educational reform.
While the political and ideological climate does not look favorable
for the teachers at the moment, it does offer them the challenge to join
a public debate with their critics, as well as the opportunity to
engage in a much needed self-critique regarding the nature and purpose
of schooling, classroom teaching and the relationship between education
and social change. Similarly, the debate provides teachers with the
opportunity to organize collectively to improve the conditions under
which they work and to demonstrate to the public the central role that
teachers must play in any viable attempt to reform the public schools.
In order for teachers and others to engage in such a debate, it is
necessary that theoretical perspectives be developed that redefine the
nature of the current educational crisis while simultaneously providing
the basis for an alternative view of teacher work. In short, this means
recognizing that the current crisis in education cannot be separated
from the rise and pernicious influence of neoliberal capitalism and
market driven power relations, both of which work in the interest of
disempowering teachers, dismantling teacher unions, and privatizing
public schools. At the very least, such recognition will have to come
to grips with a growing loss of power among teachers around the basic
conditions of their work, but also with a changing public perception of
their role as reflective practitioners.
I want to make a small theoretical contribution to this debate and
the challenge it calls forth by examining two major problems that need
to be addressed in the interest of improving the quality of "teacher
work," which includes all the clerical tasks and extra assignments as
well as classroom instruction. First, I think it is imperative to
examine the ideological and material forces that have contributed to
what I want to call the deskilling and commodification of teacher work;
that is, the tendency to reduce teachers to the status of specialized
technicians within the school bureaucracy, whose function then becomes
one of the managing and implementing curricular programs rather than
developing or critically appropriating curricula to fit specific
pedagogical concerns and the particular needs of students. Second, there
is a need to defend schools as institutions essential to maintaining
and developing a critical democracy and also to defending teachers as
public intellectuals who combine scholarly reflection and practice in
the service of educating students to be thoughtful, active citizens.
Devaluing and Deskilling Teacher Work
One of the major threats facing prospective and existing teachers
within the public schools is the increasing development of instrumental
and corporate ideologies that emphasize a technocratic approach to both
teacher preparation and classroom pedagogy. At the core of the current
emphasis on the instrumental and pragmatic factors in school life are a
number of important pedagogical assumptions. These include: a call for
the separation of conception from execution; the standardization of
school knowledge in the interest of managing and controlling it, the
increased call for standardized testing, and the devaluation of
critical, intellectual work on the part of teachers and students for the
primacy of practical considerations. In this view, teaching is reduced
to training and concepts are substituted by methods. Teaching in this
view is reduced to a set of strategies and skills and becomes synonymous
with a method or technique. Instead of learning to raise questions
about the principles underlying different classroom methods, research
techniques and theories of education, teachers are often preoccupied
with learning the "how to," with what works or with mastering the best
way to teach a given body of knowledge.
What is ignored in this retrograde view is any understanding of
pedagogy as a moral and political practice that functions as a
deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge, values and
identities are produced with particular sets of classroom social
relations. What is purposely derided in conservative notions of
teaching and learning is a view of pedagogy, which in the most critical
sense, illuminates the relationship among knowledge, authority and power
and draws attention to questions concerning who has control over the
conditions for the production of knowledge. Pedagogy in this sense
addresses and connects ethics, politics, power and knowledge within
practices that allow for generating multiple solidarities, narratives
and vocabularies as part of a broader democratic project. As Chandra
Mohanty insists, pedagogy is not only about the act of knowing, but also
about how knowledge is related to the power of self-definition,
understanding one’s relationship to others and one’s understanding and
connection to the larger world.
[17]
In the end, pedagogy is not, as many conservatives argue, about
immersing young people in predefined and isolated bits of information,
but about the issue of agency and how it can be developed in the
interest of deepening and expanding the meaning and purpose of
democratization and the formative cultures that make it possible.
Technocratic and instrumental rationalities are also at work within
the teaching field itself, and they play an increasing role in reducing
teacher autonomy with respect to the development and planning of
curricula and the judging and implementation of classroom instruction.
In the past, this took the form of what has been called "teacher-proof"
curriculum packages. The underlying rationale in many of these packages
viewed teacher work as simply the carrying out of predetermined content
and instructional procedures. The method and aim of such packages was
to legitimate what might be called "market-driven management
pedagogies." That knowledge is broken down into discrete parts,
standardized for easier management and consumption and measured through
predefined forms of assessment. Curricula approaches of this sort are
management pedagogies because the central questions regarding teaching
and learning are reduced to the problems of management, regulation and
control. While such curricula are far from absent in many schools, they
have been replaced by modes of classroom instruction geared to a
pedagogy of repression defined through the rubric of accountability.
This approach works to discipline both the body and mind in the interest
of training students to perform well in high-stakes testing schemes. It
defines quality teaching through reductive mathematical models.
[18]
Pedagogy as an intellectual, moral and political practice is now based on "measurements of value derived from
market competition."
[19]
Mathematical utility has now replaced critical dialogue, debate,
risk-taking, the power of imaginative leaps and learning for the sake of
learning. A crude instrumental rationality now governs the form and
content of curricula, and where content has the potential to open up the
possibility of critical thinking, it is quickly shut down. This is a
pedagogy that has led to the abandonment of democratic impulses,
analytic thinking, and social responsibility. It is also a pedagogy
that infantilizes both teachers and students. For instance, the Texas
GOP built into its platform the banning of
critical thinking.
[20]
Not too long ago, the Florida legislature passed a law claiming that
history had to be taught simply as a ledger of facts, banning any
attempt at what can loosely be called interpretation.
The soft underlying theoretical assumption that guides this type of
pedagogy is that the behavior of teachers needs to be controlled and
made consistent and predictable across different schools and student
populations. The more hidden and hard assumption at work here is that
teachers cannot be intellectuals, cannot think imaginatively and cannot
engage in forms of pedagogy that might enable students to think
differently, critically or more imaginatively. The deskilling of
teachers, the reduction of reason to a form of instrumental rationality,
and the disinvestment in education as a public good is also evident on a
global level in policies produced by the World Bank that impose on
countries forms of privatization and standardized curricula that
undermine the potential for critical inquiry and engaged citizenship.
Learning in this instance is depoliticized, prioritized as a method and
often reduced to teaching low-level skills, disciplinary-imposed
behaviors and corporate values. Neoliberal disciplinary measures now
function to limit students to the private orbits in which they
experience their lives while restricting the power of teachers to teach
students to think rationally, judge wisely and be able to connect
private troubles to broader public considerations.
Public schools have become an object of disdain, and teachers labor
under educational reforms that separate conception from execution,
theory from practice, and pedagogy from moral and social considerations.
As content is devalued, history erased and the economic, racial and
social inequities intensified, public schools increasingly are hijacked
by corporate and religious fundamentalists. The effect is not only to
deskill teachers, to remove them from the processes of deliberation and
reflection, but also to routinize the nature of learning and classroom
pedagogy. Needless to say, the principles underlying corporate
pedagogies are at odds with the premise that teachers should be actively
involved in producing curricula materials suited to the cultural and
social contexts in which they teach.
More specifically, the narrowing of curricula choices to a
back-to-basics format and the introduction of lock-step, time-on-task
pedagogies operate from the theoretically erroneous assumption that all
students can learn from the same materials, classroom instructional
techniques and modes of evaluation. The notion that students come from
different histories and embody different experiences, linguistic
practices, cultures and talents is strategically ignored within the
logic and accountability of management pedagogy theory. At the same
time, the school increasingly is modeled as a factory, prison or both.
Curiosity is replaced by monotony, and learning withers under the weight
of dead time.
Teachers as Public Intellectuals
In what follows, I want to argue that one way to rethink and
restructure the nature of teacher work is to view teachers as public
intellectuals. The category of intellectual is helpful in a number of
ways. First, it provides a theoretical basis for examining teacher work
as a form of intellectual labor, as opposed to defining it in purely
instrumental or technical terms. Second, it clarifies the kinds of
ideological and practical conditions necessary for teachers to function
as intellectuals. Third, it helps to make clear the role teachers play
in producing and legitimating various political, economic and social
interests through the pedagogies they endorse and utilize.
By viewing teachers as public intellectuals, we can illuminate the
important idea that all human activity involves some form of thinking.
No activity, regardless of how routinized it might become, can be
abstracted from the functioning of the mind in some capacity. This is a
crucial issue, because by arguing that the use of the mind is a general
part of all human activity we dignify the human capacity for integrating
thinking and practice, and in doing so highlight the core of what it
means to view teachers as reflective practitioners. Within this
discourse, teachers can be seen not merely as "performers professionally
equipped to realize effectively any goals that may be set for them.
Rather [they should] be viewed as free men and women with a special
dedication to the values of the intellect and the enhancement of the
critical powers of the young."
[21]
Viewing teachers as public intellectuals also provides a strong
theoretical critique of technocratic and instrumental ideologies
underlying educational theories that separate the conceptualization,
planning and design of curricula from the processes of implementation
and execution. It is important to stress that teachers must take active
responsibility for raising serious questions about what they teach, how
they are to teach and what the larger goals are for which they are
striving. This means that they must take a responsible role in shaping
the purposes and conditions of schooling. Such a task is impossible
within a division of labor in which teachers have little influence over
the conceptual and economic conditions of their work. This point has a
normative and political dimension that seems especially relevant for
teachers. If we believe that the role of teaching cannot be reduced to
merely training in the practical skills, but involves, instead, the
education of a class of engaged and public intellectuals vital to the
development of a free society, then the category of intellectual becomes
a way of linking the purpose of teacher education, public schooling and
in-service training to the principles necessary for developing a
democratic order and society. Recognizing teachers as engaged and public
intellectuals means that educators should never be reduced to
technicians, just as education should never be reduced to training.
Instead, pedagogy should be rooted in the practice of freedom - in those
ethical and political formations that expand democratic underpinnings
and principles of both the self and the broader social order.
I have argued that by viewing teachers as intellectuals we can begin
to rethink and reform the traditions and conditions that have prevented
teachers from assuming their full potential as active, reflective
scholars and practitioners. I believe that it is important not only to
view teachers as public intellectuals, but also to contextualize in
political and normative terms the concrete social functions that
teachers have both to their work and to the dominant society.
A starting point for interrogating the social function of teachers as
public intellectuals is to view schools as economic, cultural and
social sites that are inextricably tied to the issues of politics, power
and control. This means that schools do more than pass on in an
objective fashion a common set of values and knowledge. On the contrary,
schools are places that represent forms of knowledge, language
practices, social relations and values that are particular selections
and exclusions from the wider culture. As such, schools serve to
introduce and legitimate particular forms of social life. Rather than
being objective institutions removed from the dynamics of politics and
power, schools actually are contested spheres that embody and express
struggles over what forms of authority, types of knowledge, forms of
moral regulation and versions of the past and future should be
legitimated and transmitted to students.
Schools are always political because they both produce particular
kinds of agents, desires and social relations and they legitimate
particular notions of the past, present and future. The struggle is
most visible in the demands, for example, of right-wing religious groups
currently trying to inject creationism in the schools, institute school
prayer, remove certain books from school libraries and include certain
forms of religious teachings in the curricula. Of course, different
demands are made by feminists, ecologists, minorities, and other
interest groups who believe that the schools should teach women's
studies, courses on the environment or black history. In short, schools
are not neutral sites, and teachers cannot assume the posture of being
neutral either.
Central to the category of public intellectual is the necessity of
making the pedagogical more political and the political more
pedagogical. Making the pedagogical more political means inserting
schooling directly into the political sphere by arguing that schooling
represents both a struggle to define meaning and a struggle over agency
and power relations. Within this perspective, critical reflection and
action become part of a fundamental social project to help students
develop a deep and abiding faith in the struggle to overcome economic,
political and social injustices, and to further humanize themselves as
part of this struggle. In this case, knowledge and power are
inextricably linked to the presupposition that to choose life, to
recognize the necessity of improving its democratic and qualitative
character for all people, is to understand the preconditions necessary
to struggle for it. Teaching must be seen as a political, civic and
ethical practice precisely because it is directive, that is, an
intervention that takes up the ethical responsibility of recognizing, as
Paulo Freire points out, that human life is conditioned but not
determined.
A critical pedagogical practice does not transfer knowledge but
create the possibilities for its production, analysis and use. Without
succumbing to a kind of rigid dogmatism, teachers should provide the
pedagogical conditions for students to bear witness to history, their
own actions and the mechanisms that drive the larger social order so
that they can imagine the inseparable connection between the human
condition and the ethical basis of our existence. Educators have a
responsibility for educating students in ways that allow them to hold
power accountable, learn how to govern and develop a responsibility to
others and a respect for civic life. The key here is to recognize that
being a public intellectual is no excuse for being dogmatic. While it is
crucial to recognize that education has a critical function, the
teachers’ task is not to mold students but to encourage human agency, to
provide the conditions for students to be self-determining and to
struggle for a society that is both autonomous and democratic.
Making the political more pedagogical means treating students as
critical agents; making knowledge problematic and open to debate;
engaging in critical and thoughtful dialogue; and making the case for a
qualitatively better world for all people. In part, this suggests that
teachers as public intellectuals take seriously the need to give
students an active voice in their learning experiences. It also means
developing a critical vernacular that is attentive to problems
experienced at the level of everyday life, particularly as they are
related to pedagogical experiences connected to classroom practice. As
such, the pedagogical starting point for such intellectuals is not the
isolated student removed from the historical and cultural forces that
bear down on their lives but individuals in their various cultural,
class, racial and historical contexts, along with the particularity of
their diverse problems, hopes, and dreams.
As public intellectuals, teachers should develop a discourse that
unites the language of critique with the language of possibility. In
this instance, educators not only recognize the need to act on the
world, to connect reading the word with reading the world, but also make
clear that it is within their power individually and collectively to do
so. In taking up this project, they should work under conditions that
allow them to speak out against economic, political and social
injustices both within and outside of schools. At the same time, they
should work to create the conditions that give students the opportunity
to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and
courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism
unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this case is neither a call to
social engineering nor an excuse to overlook the difficult conditions
that shape both schools and the larger social order. On the contrary, it
is the precondition for providing those languages and values that point
the way to a more democratic and just world. As Judith Butler has
argued, there is more hope in the world when we can question common
sense assumptions and believe that what we know is directly related to
our ability to help change the world around us, though it is far from
the only condition necessary for such change.
[22]
Hope provides the basis for dignifying our labor as intellectuals; it
offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, and
allows teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as
fundamental dimensions of learning. As Ernst Bloch insists, hope is
"not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we
could only do something for it."
[23]
Hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given - and lays
open a pedagogical terrain in which teachers and students can engage in
critique, dialogue and an open-ended struggle for justice. As difficult
as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a
struggle worth waging. To deny educators the opportunity to assume the
role of public intellectuals is to prevent teachers from gaining control
over the conditions of the work, denying them the right to "push at the
frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure
beauty from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where
others never thought to look,"
[24]
and to model what it means for intellectuals to exhibit civic courage
by giving education a central role in constructing a world that is more
just, equitable and democratic in dark times.
What role might public school teachers play as public intellectuals
in light of the brutal killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School? In the
most immediate sense, they can raise their collective voices against
the educational influence of a larger culture and spectacle of violence
and the power of the gun lobby to flood the country with deadly weapons.
They can show how this culture of violence is only one part of a
broader and all-embracing militarized culture of war, arms industry and a
Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic, more characteristic of an
authoritarian society than a democracy. They can mobilize young people
to both stand up for teachers, students and public schools by advocating
for policies that invest in schools rather than in the
military-industrial complex and its massive and expensive weapons of
death. They can educate young people and a larger public to support gun
regulation and the democratization of the culture industries that now
trade in violence as a form of entertainment; they can speak out against
the educational, political, and economic conditions in which violence
has become a sport in America - one of the most valuable practices and
assets of the national entertainment state. The violent screen culture
of video games, extreme sports, violent Hollywood films, television
dramas and other cultural productions do not just produce entertainment,
they are mainly teaching machines that instruct children into a
sadistic culture in which killing is all right, violence is fun and
masculinity is defined increasingly through its propensity to make
celebrities out of killers. This is a culture that serves as a
recruiting tool for the military, makes military force rather than
democratic idealism the highest national ideal and war the most
important organizing principle of society.
Public school teachers can join with parents, churches, synagogues,
Mosques and other individuals and institutions to address the larger
socioeconomic and ideological values and practices that legitimize a
hyper-masculinity fueled by the death-dealing assumption that war and a
primitive tribalism make men, irrespective of the violence they promote
against women, gays, students and people with disabilities. America is
obsessed with violence and death, and this fixation not only provides
profits for Hollywood, the defense industries and the weapons
industries, it also reproduces a culture of war and cruelty that has
become central to America’s national identity - one that is as shameful
as it is deadly to its children and others. The war on public school
teachers and children has reached its tragic apogee with the brutal and
incomprehensible killing of the young children in Sandy Hook. What kind
of country has the United States become in its willingness allow this
endless barrage of symbolic and material violence to continue? Why has
violence become the most powerful mediating force shaping social
relations in the United States? Why do we allow a government to use
drones to kill young children abroad? Why do we allow the right-wing
media and the mainstream press to constantly denigrate both teachers and
young people? Why are the lives of young people one of our lowest
national priorities? Why do we denigrate public servants such as
teaches, who educate, nurture and safeguard young people? What kind of
country betrays its teachers and denigrates public education? How does
the violence against teachers and students destroy the connective tissue
that makes the shared bonds of trust, compassion and justice possible
not only in our schools but also in a democracy?
[1]
Adam Bessie, "Public Teachers:
America’s New ‘Welfare Queens," Truthout (March 6, 2011). For a list
such humiliations, see VetGrl, “Here are your Parasites and Terrorists,
M*therf*ckers,” Daily Kos (December 15, 2012). Online:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/15/1170268/-Here-are-your-parasites-and-terrorists-m-therf-ckers
[2]
Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy,
Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2010); Henry A. Giroux,
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2008); David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[3]
Diane Ravitch, "The People Behind
the Lawmakers Out to Destroy Pubic Education: a Primer What you Need to
know about ALEC," CommonDreams (May 2, 2012).
[4]
See Henry A. Giroux,
Education and the Struggle for Public Values (Boulder: Paradigm, 2012); Ken Saltman,
The Failure of Corporate School Reform (New York: Palgrave, 2012); Diane Ravitch,
The Death and Life of the Great American School System (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Alex Means,
Schooling in the Age of Austerity (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
[5]
In the corruption of Wall Street, see, for example, Jeff Madrick,
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (New York: Vintage, 2011); Charles Ferguson,
Predator Nation (New York: Crown Business, 2012); Henry A. Giroux,
Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
[6]
I am not just talking about
right-wing Republicans but also about the Obama administration policy on
education, which has reproduced the worse dimensions of the former Bush
administration’s policies on educational reform, which are as
reactionary as they are detrimental to the quality, if not future, of
public education in the United States.
[7]
Mustafha Marruchi, "The Value of Literature as a Public Institution," College Literature 33: 4 (Fall 2006), p. 176.
[8]
Sara Robinson , "How the
Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking - and What That Means
For Our Kids' Future," AlterNet, (May 20, 2012). Online:
http://www.alternet.org/education/155469/how_the_conservative_worldview_quashes_critical_thinking_--_and_what_that_means_for_our_kids%27_future?page=entire
[9]
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Education for
Profit, Education for Freedom," Liberal Education, (Summer 2009), p. 6.
Also see, Martha C. Nussbaum,
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010)
[10]
Stanley Aronowitz, "Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy: Not Mainly a teaching method," in Robert Lake and Tricia Kress,
Paulo Freire's Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012).
[11]
Noam Chomsky, "The Assault on Public Education," TruthOut, April 4, 2012.
[12]
Les Leopold, "Hey Dad, Why Does This Country Protect Billionaires, and Not Teachers?" AlterNet, (May 5, 2010).
[13]
Ken Saltman and David A. Gabbard, eds.
Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2010); David A. Gabbard and E. Wayne Ross, eds.
Education Under The Security State (Defending Public Schools) (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008).
[14]
Henry Giroux,
Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
[15]
Ibid., Robinson , "How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking - and What That Means For Our Kids' Future."
[16]
There is a great deal of
literature written about zero-tolerance policies. For a brilliant
academic discussion, see Christopher Robbins,
Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling
(New York: SUNY Press, 2009); Julianne Hing, "The Shocking Details of a
Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline," Truthout, (December 3, 2012);
Donna Lierberman, "Schoolhouse to Courthouse," The New York Times,
(December 8, 2012).
[17]
Chandra Mohanty, "On Race and
Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s," Cultural Critique
(Winter 1989-1990), p. 192.
[18]
See, for example, Sam Dillon,
"Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains in Use, and Critics," New York
Times (August 31, 2010), p. A1.
[19]
Michael Collins, "Universities need reform – but the market is not the answer", openDemocracy, (November 23, 2010).
[20]
Danny Weil, "Texas GOP Declares: ‘No
More Teaching of ‘Critical Thinking Skills’ in Texas Public Schools,"
Truthout (July 7, 2012).
[21]
Israel Scheffler,
Reason and Teaching (New York: Routledge, 1973), p. 92.
[22]
Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn
Worsham, "Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical
Resignification," JAC 20:4 (200), p. 765.
[23]
Ernst Bloch, "Something’s
Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the
Contradictions of Utopian Longing," in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function
of Art and Literature: Selected essays (Cambridge, Mass." MIT Press,
1988), p. 3.
[24]
Arundhati Roy,
Power Politics (Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 2001), P. 1.
